Netflix Adds 5-Minute Videos For Kids To Give Parents A Bedtime Bargaining Tool

If you’re a parent, you probably face bedtime with a grim determination to stick to your guns, stay firm and get that kid tucked in and the lights out when you say so. Not as easy as it sounds, as many of you likely know: kids are wily adversaries, armed with a seemingly endless arsenal of excuses and a knack for bargaining. Netflix wants to help parents compromise with their tiny foes, launching a collection of five-minute bedtime videos.

To give parents a bargaining tool, Netflix is offering a new series of five-minute videos called Dinotrux 5 Minute Favorites. The idea here, it seems, is that agreeing to “just one more!” episode of your kids’ favorite show will only push bedtime back by five minutes, instead of the 20 or so minutes of a traditional TV show.

Netflix trots out some figures from a recent survey of 7,000 parents from seven different countries to support the idea that kids are skilled manipulators at bedtime: 61% of parents experience kids who try to stall bedtime. Of those, 79% of parents are willing to compromise, spending up to 20 minutes a night trying to make a deal with their offspring. American kids turned out to be the most likely to try to delay bedtime through creative tactics. Shocking.

Of course, there will always be those kids who then just demand to watch the same five-minute videos over and over again, which is nothing new in the YouTube era. “Just one more cat video, Mom! PLEASE.”

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist